First, the above scatter plot shows that there were a large number of polling stations that experience perfect or near-perfect turnout, which itself is bizarre and extremely unlikely. Second, at these polling places, United Russia received an extremely high percentage of the votes cast (i.e. 90% or greater).

And this is/was the distribution of overall voter turnout:

We would probably expect for the distribution of voting turnouts to be Gaussian - i.e. that it has a bell shape with one peak and very small values at the extremes (i.e. at 0% and 100% turnout). Obviously, the distribution of voting turnout in Russia in this most recent election does not follow a Gaussian curve.

The conclusion from the statisticians who created the above charts:

There is strong evidence for widespread vote manipulation in the 2011 Russian elections. While much of the press has focused on reports of voter fraud in large metropolitan areas, this analysis indicates that fraud may have occurred on a ever-wider scale in other areas. It is difficult toquantitatively estimate how muchfraud occurred, but a simple estimate would be to see how many less ballots would have been cast for United Russia if the polling stations with the highest 20% of turnout voted along the same lines as the others. In this case United Russia would have received 3.54 million fewer votes.

I haven't done the math, so I don't know the exact numbers, but given the incredible deviation from what's expected in the charts above, I would guess that the odds of a fair election having an outcome like the charts above is one in many trillion - i.e. that we would expect to see the above outcome less than once per the entire lifetime of our universe.

2 comments:

There's already a paper on the Popular Physics arXiv, by a gentleman with a Russian name, claiming that the Gaussian analysis is invalid. It's hilariously lame, but has good photos.http://arxiv.org/pdf/1112.3627

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